Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

This is obviously a “pretentious fiction” list, but there are some puzzling omissions. Where’s Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, for example? And I’d be curious to do the same thing for non-fiction. “A Brief History of Time”. Bill Clinton’s autobiography. “Civilization”. That kind of thing….

UPDATE:joined in.

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Mind you, strange novel with tongue mostly in cheek though it is, “Whit” put me on to the idea of Scottish-Indian fusion cookery; Bombay Potato goes *surprisingly* well with haggis.

(Quick note of clarification; Geoff’s edited the article to specifically mention the absence of “Satanic Verses”, rather than the absence of anything by Rushdie, so my commented pointer to “Midnight’s Children” may look like incongruous now, it wasn’t when originally posted ).

Well it would appear you read more than I do. Although I have more double X’s. Don’t know if you go back and re-read books, but I do.

I think the list is pretty random. It’s not a list of “great books”; it’s a list of “books you’ve probably heard of, plus a few that you have not heard of.” I don’t think it’s a list of books that somebody thinks you “should” read.

But anyway, I notice no X on your list next to Heart of Darkness. On my list it has XX++++++++++++++++, although there should probably be a few more X’s there. It’s a dark horror story that is laugh-out-loud funny in lots of places, it’s profound, the language is sublime, and what Conrad does with the whole narrative voice, narrative point of view pretty much marks the transition to 20th century technique that we now take for granted–implicitly reminding you that the whole narrative is a construct (without hitting you over the head with this fact, as Joyce does, or ignoring it, as everybody except Laurence Sterne and Cervantes did until the 1900′s.)

Also, given the existing list, I’m surprised they didn’t include either or both of “Beowulf” and “The Canterbury Tales” (original idioms, vocabulary and spellings mandated, naturally) .

@Geoff: FWIW, there was a piece on Radio 4 yesterday regarding Satanic Verses; the presenter considers it to be probably Rushdie’s finest work, as well as definitely his most misunderstood. You might like to point your browser at the “Listen Again” service.

All of the weird omissions can be explained by one simple fact. The original list by the BBC was a list of the most popular books, which someone apparently have modified to make it more high-brow. When I did a comparison between the original list and the list that is going around now, and only 57 of the books are on both.